1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to search and retrieval technologies. More specifically, the invention relates to the use of special characters in the search strategies to enhance the search experience of the users of communication devices.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, in communication devices, the users of the communication devices are required to search for the contacts to which the user needs to communicate. Therefore, every time a user needs to communicate with a person, the user needs to manually type a search string in the phonebook of his/her communication device to retrieve the contact details of a required person.
Further, many times there are cases where a user needs to send one message to multiple recipients. In such cases, the user gets bound to repeat the procedure of searching and adding recipient's contact details in a recipient list. This may be an exhausting and uninteresting job for many people. Also, this may consume a lot of precious time of the users of the communication devices.
Currently, there exist solutions in communication devices, where the user can search contacts by pressing few digits/numbers/alphabets of the person whom the user wants to call or message. For example, the user can search the contacts if he/she remembers few digits of the phone number of the person whom he/she wants to contact. Similarly, the user can search the contacts by entering few alphabets of the person. Thus, after receiving such inputs, the device populates the screen of the communication device with the possible matches and then provides the user with the list of contacts which matches the desired query.
However, if the user want to establish a conference call or if the user want to have a call with more than one calling party, then the user may have to search for contacts separately one by one and then connect the desired candidates in a conference call. This may even keep the other party on hold. Moreover, the current solutions are manual processes that require a user to search for each contact one at a time. Then the communication channel may be established one at a time by keeping one or more parties on hold before establishing a communication channel. This may again be a time consuming and exhausting work for many people. Also, as the current solutions are manual, therefore risk of human errors in the work will always be present.
Therefore, there is a need for improvement in the search and retrieval technology to make the searching experience of the users more interesting, more interactive and less time consuming. Furthermore, there is a need of a system and corresponding method to display the searched results in a user friendly manner.